‘In our Commentaries,’ concludes the Expositor, ‘it will consequently be found that we have made it our particular study to elicit and present the old historical, but hitherto neglected, sense of the Scriptures. In this view, and to make available the author’s annotations, of which he has left a great many, we have taken no small amount of pains--_non parum est nobis desudatum_. Nor, indeed, had we to do with his annotations only; for the text of the copy we followed is corrected in numberless places by the hand of the author himself. I may, therefore, venture to affirm that Pagnini’s translation, as it now appears, approximates more closely to the meaning and spirit of the Hebrew than any former version. But the Church, and those learned in the Hebrew tongue, must be the judges here--any others are incompetent.’ From what he says, Villanovanus would therefore lead us to believe that he had had the privilege of working from a copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini himself, the author of the translation. But on a somewhat careful collation of the Villanovanus edition of 1542 with that of Lyons of 1527-28 (the _editio princeps_, we apprehend), and the reprint from this by Melchior Novesianus of Cologne, of 1541, we are forced on the conviction that Villanovanus followed no copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, but the fine edition of Novesianus, admirably edited by the learned publisher himself. The text of this is in fact identical with that of Villanovanus, and the headings to the chapters and references to corresponding and corroborative texts are all but uniformly alike in the two. There are no variorum readings, if we recollect aright, in the Novesianus; but neither are there any of the slightest significance in the Villanovanus--unless perchance the reader should think that the text is improved by Noah being directed in building the Ark to ‘pitch it with pitch’--_picabis eam pice_, instead of bitumen--_bituminabis eam bitumine_!